8:55a-10:10a D (25) 3 cr.
COLLEGE INTENSIVE WRITING SECTION
This course will cut across centuries and nations to study the techniques and essentials of great fiction-writing—from characterization to symbolism, and from unreliable narrators to implied readers. In doing so, it will also—inevitably--investigate the perennial human appeal and the cultural power of story-telling. We will study (in logical, not chronological order) sketches, short stories, novellas (2), and whole novels (2) by such 19th-century authors as: Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist), Margaret Oliphant, Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad (“The Secret Sharer”), and Henry James. 20th-century authors may include: Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Jim Thompson, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Sandra Cisneros, John Updike, John Barth, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, and Don De Lillo. Two mandatory film screenings. Two mid-terms; three papers (one short, one medium, one long,); cumulative final exam. Some choice between critical and creative assignments. I will lecture formally on occasions, but questions, discussion, participation, and argument will be essential to this class.